Wednesday, December 29, 2010

STUDIO VOGUE Gallery is pleased to welcome Ned Martin as one of several artists featured in Time Passages, our winter exhibition of gallery artists, including Jackie Hall, J. A. Fligel, Donna Koster, Victor Oriecuia, and Vivien Schmidt... more

Time Passages. STUDIO VOGUE Gallery is pleased to welcome Ned Martin as one of several artists featured in Time Passages, our winter exhibition of gallery artists. Martin transports the viewer to a familiar place through a universal language and gives pause, even for a brief moment, to celebrate the unique quality of his subject. Martin will be joined by Jackie Hall, J. A. Fligel, Donna Koster, Victor Oriecuia, and Vivien Schmidt among others. This eclectic selection is sure to warm up a winter's day with works in oil and acrylic, bronze and marble sculpture, and fine art photography.

Ned Martin is a Realism Oil Painter who lives in New York, New York. He spent his early life and his years as an art major at Towson State University in Maryland exploring various painting media including acrylics, watercolor, pastels, and gouache. Several years ago, he began painting in oils and furthered his formal art training at The Schuler School of Fine Art in Baltimore where he learned the traditional oil painting techniques and principles of Jacques Maroger and the Old Masters.

Ned has embraced the Schuler School experience and continues to meticulously prepare his own wood panels and grind his own paint. While his paintings appear realistic, upon close scrutiny the viewer is delighted with broken impressionistic layers of paint that imply realism. Ned invests considerably in scrubbing, scratching, and scrapping layers of textured paint until a realistic form reveals itself.

STUDIO VOGUE Gallery – representing mid-career and emerging artists from Canada and around the world ... more

STUDIO VOGUE Gallery – representing mid-career and emerging artists from Canada and around the world.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

NEW YORK— Just in time for Christmas, scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have given themselves a giant Velázquez, though in truth it is more of a re-gifting — the portrait of Philip IV of Spain had originally come into the collection nearly 100 years ago, but its attribution was downgraded in 1973 to the Old Master's studio. Now, a new cleaning effort has returned the work conclusively to the revered painter's column, according to the New York Times.
Despite possessing a 1624 receipt for the painting that was signed by Velázquez, the Met had reconsidered the portrait's authorship in the 1970s as part of a general auditing of its European painting collection that humbled attributions on 15 percent of its holdings, with the Philip canvas raising doubts in part because of over-varnishing inflicted by its previous owner, legendary dealer Lord Duveen. But a year-long restoration process of the work — which has not weathered the years well, losing an eye at one point, possibly to a vandal — has persuaded connoisseurs that the doubts had been misplaced. "One of the greatest painters of Western tradition — and a royal portrait to boot — is vindicated," Met European paintings chairman Keith Christiansen told the Times. Velázquez scholar Jonathan Brown has likewise welcomed the news. "Although it has suffered losses, what remains is by Velázquez," he said.
The reattribution comes improbably hard on the heels of another Velázquez discovery in the Met's collection, a circa 1630 "Portrait of a Man" that was determined to be by the artist's hand, and not his studio, in September of 2009. But the New York institution is not alone in finding treasures under its nose, and the Old Masters have been popping up everywhere this year. A third Velázquez was discovered by a specialist at the Yale University Art Gallery this summer — making for a remarkable spate of discoveries given that the painter is known to have made only about 110 works during his lifetime.
Then an enormous peasant scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elderwas recognized by the Prado in Madrid, a Rembrandtwas noticed hanging in the waiting room of the Rotterdam's Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, a giant once-waterlogged crucifix painting was attributed to Giotto in Florence, a potential Michelangelopietà painting was spotted in an upstate New York home, and the Vatican even said it had uncovered a previously unknown Caravaggio just in time for the 400th anniversary of his death... but had to take back the claim when it was widely debunked.